HackMaster GameMaster Guide

[Messageboard Golem]

This book gives GameMasters all they need to know to delve into the wonderful, adventurous world of the HackMaster role-playing game. It is all about killing and breaking things in this over- the-top RPG of mad sorcerers, armies of orcs and wicked weapons. This book includes details on combat, magic items, the truth about spell mishaps, information on poison and many more essential elements of a GM arsenal to use against player characters. Derived from the 1st/ 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game system (under license), millions of players already know the basics - now you can get the details!

 

[Celestian]

The Hackmaster GMs Guide is 366 pages long. The font is tight and the margins small. The Table of Contents and the index are very useful. Price is 30 dollars.

As I mentioned in the Players Handbook review Hackmaster is a game that anyone who enjoyed AD&D would enjoy. This book contains the GM only information for Hackmaster.

Detailed rules on how a GM should handle quirks and flaws. How to manage the alignment shifts, how to keep track of them as well.

A large portion of the book details the combat system clarifying many rules and the new crit and fumble system that is introduced in Hackmaster. 3 detailed charts for slash, pierce and crush contain all possible results on a critical hit for each type of weapon. Shoot an arrow into the chest of your enemy, pierce a lung, cause them to go into shock!

Rewards and treasure are also detailed explaining how much exp to award players for their individual adventures. A complete list of tables to generate magic items (scrolls, potions, rings, wands, staves, weapons and armor for example) as well as gold, gems and furs. Most of the magic items from AD&D are included as well as a large selection of new items.

The chapter Experience, Schools and training includes all you'll need to know for your players to advance in level, train new skills. Giving you details on school size, school location, teacher quality and costs for training.

The GMG contains a huge collection of charts and tables for almost any situation you might encounter. Morale modifiers to tavern names and drinking games. There are also charts and tables for random encounters for just about every terrain type.

The organization of the book is a lot like the PHB covering each topic in a chapter in great detail. Details on everything the GM could possibly need.

 

[lwmarti]

The Basics

The HackMaster GameMaster's Guide (GMG) is a 368-page paperback that has a suggested retail price of $29.99 and was written by the HackMaster Development Team: Jolly Blackburn, Brian Jelke, Steve Johansson and David Kenzer. The font is a bit small, but the small font certainly lets them pack in lots of material into those 368 pages, and boy, is it ever packed in. It has a useful Table of Contents and Index, and it's extremely easy to find what you're looking for. I don't care much about art in game products, so I won't mention much about it aside from the fact that the drawings by the Fraim brothers do an excellent job of defining the overall feel of the game, much like Tony DiTerlizzi's work did for Planescape.

What's Inside

The information in the HackMaster GMG gives you all that you need to inflict brutal critical hits on the characters in your game and to fully take advantage of all those annoying quirks and flaws that your players took during character creation to max out their stats and make them near-invincible. But there's more than that. Much more. It has the usual material that you would expect to find in a product aimed at a game master: all the details that you need to run encounters, the mechanics of advancing experience levels, running campaigns, lists of magic items, and so on. It's where you can find out the details on both the Hackmaster +12 and the Chain Mail Bikini of Remote Eye Gouging. It's also where you can learn about the Axe of Rapid Whacks and about the Boots of Groin Kicking. (OK, some of these aren't quite as serious as the others, but they're all in this book.) And since HackMaster is extremely compatible with AD&D, all of the material in this book can be used in your existing AD&D games.

The Bottom Line

If you're planning on running HackMaster, this book is essential; there's material in it that you absolutely have to have to run the game, but aside from this book and the Player's Handbook, but your AD&D books can be easily used for virtually everything else, so if you don't feel inclined to pick up all eight volumes of the Hacklopedia of Beasts (HackMaster's answer to the Monster Manual), you can easily do without them.

If you're not planning on running HackMaster there's still a good amount of material in this book that you can easily adapt to any game system, and if you're playing using either of the editions of AD&D then the material in this book will fit seamlessly into your game. Is this book an example of inspired genius that leaves you in awe of the creative powers of its authors? Perhaps not, but it's an extremely solid and useful book nevertheless, which should also appeal to players and DMs of the earlier (pre-d20) versions of the D&D game.